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16/01/2012

Britannia Beef Dripping

Intermission: Dripping

Dripping?

I gather the word is unfamiliar to many around the world - simply put, dripping is the fat juices collected from a roasting joint. The fat drips into a tray and is collected for cooking with later, hence dripping.

Let's look to Wikipedia to see if there is a better description: "Dripping, also known usually as beef dripping or more rarely, as pork dripping, is an animal fat produced from the fatty or otherwise unusable parts of cow or pig carcasses. It is similar to lard and tallow although tallow is an unacceptable flavor for shortening or cooking generally."

"Preparation is traditionally described as collection of the residue from meat roasts but true production is from such residue added to boiling water with a generous amount of salt. The stock pot should be chilled and the solid lump of dripping which settles when chilled should be scraped clean and re-chilled for future use."

So, much akin to lard and tallow.

Dripping is awesome! It is that simple. Furthermore, dripping is pretty much defended as the last bastion of pre-industrial food and used widely in Yorkshire in traditional food as well as our plentiful 'Chippies' - Fish & Chip shops, in fact I talked about dripping in the post about Chips.

Dripping has a high smoke point (something like 280C) and checking the figures on the Rancimat analysis can be continuously fried for something like 40 hours before it becomes oxidised.

Now, that is a fat! That is a fat fit for paleo!

Britannia brand is popular throughout the UK and can be found in most supermarkets. It is commercially extracted, but don't let that put you off. As I mused in Coming in From the Cold, when it comes to packaged food we have the ingredient principle to guide us: "does the list of ingredients read longer than the description of the food?"